


Dazed & Confused

by cyberpIanner



Category: Doctor Who, Torchwood
Genre: A Ridiculous Amount Of Mutual Pining, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, M/M, Major Season 1 Spoilers, Post-Episode: s01e13 The Parting of the Ways, it's nice to have some drabble once in a while, just a lot of ramble to be honest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-12-09 12:17:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20994686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyberpIanner/pseuds/cyberpIanner
Summary: Trying to understand your feelings is surprisingly difficult when you're practically immortal. Saying you'd die for someone either loses it's meaning or gains so much more depending on how you look at it, and Captain Jack Harkness can't stop thinking about how many times he'd died for the Doctor.





	Dazed & Confused

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FeralXWingPilot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeralXWingPilot/gifts).

> dedicated to my lovely best friend peter <3  
i love u so much bro xx
> 
> based on the song "dazed & confused" by ruel because it's so accurate to jack and ten's relationship :((

The soft whirr of the TARDIS echoed in the Doctor's ears as his ships's telepathic link probed curiously at his brain. 

_"What's bothering you, dear?"_ she seemed to ask.

The Doctor sighed.

"I don't know," he replied out loud.

The truth was, the Doctor knew exactly what was bothering him and the TARDIS, being telepathic, of course, knew all too well. They were both fundamentally bothered by the exact same thing, though it appeared to be for very different reasons.

Captain Jack Harkness: leader of Torchwood, Face of Boe, and currently the Doctor's most difficult jigsaw puzzle yet. All that time ago, before his most recent regeneration, the assertive captain came swinging into the Doctor's life like Apollo. Though the 'Chula warship' scam had ruffled his feathers at first, forcing him to shut Jack out based purely on spite (and a little bit of jealousy, though he would never admit it), he had slowly but surely let his guard down around the ex-time agent. 

Big mistake. 

Jack didn't do anything wrong, no, far from that. He did everything _right_. The Doctor had embarked on many adventures with Jack by his side and not one of them ended with the Doctor being able to think straight. Honestly speaking, he couldn't think straight from the moment Jack entered the room. It was tearing him apart. 

He had sworn that after he lost Rose he would never fall in love again. It was too painful - the looming fear of abandonment or loss that the Doctor knew would always come to haunt him in the end. He had watched too many people he had loved die. 

The curse of the Time Lord: two hearts to love with, two hearts to break and a lifespan long enough to guarantee it. 

But Jack Harkness was different. Jack Harkness was immortal; Rose made him that way with the help of the TARDIS and maybe - just maybe - that happened for a reason. The very thought that they purposely made the Doctor a companion he could be with forever made his hearts flutter, but the realisation soon dawned upon him that the TARDIS hated Jack. That man was a fact throughout the whole of space and time and the TARDIS couldn't stand it. How typical to despise one's own creation. 

The Doctor would have loved to be in control of the situation - to fly over to Jack and have him on board whenever he pleased, but his ship simply wouldn't allow it. She wouldn't budge. There was something about that man that the TARDIS was almost... afraid of. As if she was petrified by the mere concept of the annoyingly handsome human. He had no say in where his own ship went when it came to Jack, so when he had the chance to get him through those blue wooden doors he savoured every moment like it was his last. He had no control over what he did or said around Jack either because every time he looked into those eyes he felt his knees begin to wobble. It was all too much; though he still acted like he hated him. _Why?_

The Doctor knew why. He couldn't bear Jack finding out how he felt - how he had always really felt - then feeling the wrath of Jack's sympathetic rejection. He couldn't bear to hear the one person he could actually spend the rest of his life with turn him down without a second thought. It all seemed too probable to risk. The last of the Time Lords was afraid of rejection.

Meanwhile, the wind ran its hands through Jack Harkness' hair as he lay on the concrete rooftop of... some sort of building. He wasn't sure what it was for, he simply picked a tall building and scaled it. He was in the middle of the roof, resisting the temptation to swing his legs over the edge and watch the bustling London streets below. He had grown too reckless recently, what with being immortal and everything. There was no reason to be careful anymore other than the fact that he could still feel pain, but that’s besides the point. He was thinking. Thinking about the Doctor. Gazing up into the night sky was a strange sensation for him no matter what planet he was on, but when he was on Earth it became almost... saddening. So many stars and planets and galaxies out there and he had all the time in the universe (literally) to see them, but he was stuck on boring old planet Earth.

Most of Jack's days were spent waiting for that sound - that beautiful sound - the sound of the entire universe expanding at a rapidly accelerating rate, creating galaxies and entire civilisations in its wake. The sound of the TARDIS. He longed so badly to be among the stars with the Doctor, that beautiful man he had fallen in love with all those years ago. It felt like centuries to Jack and it bloody well could have been, but it had probably only been about six or seven years - maybe even less. 

He recalled the time they battled the Daleks on Satellite Five: the day the Doctor left him to rot - left him there in ruins. He couldn't blame him, no, of course not. He didn't know - at least, not at the time. Rose had the power to do anything she wanted, and she wanted nothing more at that moment than for her friends to be alive and well. So the TARDIS fixed him in the only way she knew how: she gave him life - eternal life. It seemed like a blessing at first, he no longer had to fear death because he knew it would never come, but all good things must come to an end and he realised the truth very quickly. The pain never stops. You can still die when you're immortal and it _hurts_. Just because you're immortal doesn't mean you can't starve. The only exception is that you come right back to life afterwards and you remember every single second of it. Death is a scary concept, even for the immortal. He didn't know how long he stayed on that desolate spacecraft, starving to death and coming back to life over and over again until he couldn't bear it anymore. He had been subjected to a life of torture, and for what? 

The first death was terrifying. He could feel each organ shut down as his body lacked the nutrients to sustain them but his brain kept fighting for him. It took about a week for him to succumb to the famine, using up the last of the water supply on his final day. He truly believed he was going to die for real, with no Rose Tyler or TARDIS or Doctor to bring him back from the dead, but then he woke up and he was all better. He had meat on his bones and what felt like a full stomach, but the cycle simply began again. 

Months and months went by in which all he could do was starve. The dead Daleks had begun to decay around him and they reeked. Take the most disgusting smell you have ever had the misfortune of smelling, then multiply it by a million. That isn't even close to the stench of rotting Dalek flesh. Each 'life' he had a few days to do things around the base before his hunger and dehydration grew too intense to bear and he resorted to curling up in a ball and dying on the harsh metal floor. He mostly occupied himself with building work, trying to clean the place up a bit so that it was bearable to live in: he ejected the rotting Daleks from the escape pods, though the smell still lingered for a while; he cleaned up debris and used it to make decorations to put in his favourite rooms; he found some paint in one of the supply cupboards and redid the walls of his "bedroom"; the list goes on. Satellite Five had everything Jack needed... except for fresh food and water.

At that point, he’d pretty much given up on trying to get out. His vortex manipulator was broken beyond repair and he couldn’t exactly jump out of the craft into the expanses of space.

It had probably been about a year into his sentence when he heard the sound. That beautiful sound of rescue coming from the main control room. He had no strength to get up and run to his saviours, his skin clinging to his bones and his mouth completely absent of saliva. All he could do was lie in wait for someone to find him (which wasn't anything new). He was found... eventually. Maybe an hour or so after he heard that gorgeous, breathtaking noise. He had begun to suspect it was simply a death-induced hallucination until a tall, lanky man with an absolutely epic hairdo burst through the door to his resting place. It was the Doctor, and he was new. New face, new body, new_ everything_.

Jack was infuriated, and rightly so. 

He had forgiven him now, for leaving him there. How couldn't he when every time anyone said the word 'Doctor', even in a completely unrelated context, his heart skipped in circles around the playground of his body, jumping through hoops and swinging on the monkey bars of his mind. Nothing would ever stop that. It was something about his eyes: so old when the rest of him appeared so young. You could look into the Doctor's eyes and see everything in the universe at once - past, present, future. The burden of a Time Lord consciousness. He was over 908 years old now, Jack couldn't let himself forget that. Jack was like a child compared to the Doctor; all humans were like children in the eyes of a Time Lord, the species itself existing for a mere fraction of the reign of the Gallifreyan civilisation itself. 

A Time Lord would surely outlive a human by centuries, if not millenia, so it was no surprise the Doctor had an aversion to human love interests. That was all Jack thought about back in the day. The fact that he had no chance with the Doctor tore his heart to shreds until he broke down crying almost every night asking the universe why he had to meet this wonderful man in the first place. Things were a lot different now, though. He was immortal. He knew how the Doctor felt. The life span of a Time Lord went from incomprehensible to puny within a millisecond on that godforsaken satellite. He could be with the Doctor until the last Gallifreyan perished, but then he would have to carry that burden for all eternity.

Jack was torn from his existential contemplation by the familiar trilling of the TARDIS materialising around him. Dazed and confused, he shot up, eyes darting wildly around the main control room of his favourite sentient time machine. A surge of indescribable emotion overcame him, lifting him to his feet and sending him stumbling towards the console, completely unable to walk straight.

He very quickly ended up finding himself in the arms of who he could only assume to be the Doctor and suddenly everything made sense. This was how things were supposed to be. The Doctor hugged him tight (so tight Jack could literally feel his two hearts beating through his chest) and gently wound a hand through his hair, the sensation of his warmth bringing Jack to tears within an instant. He sobbed pathetically into the Doctor’s shoulder, grabbing desperately at his back as if he’d slip away again if he didn’t hold on tight enough. He didn’t want to lose him again. He wanted to stay travelling with the Doctor for the rest of his ridiculously long life. It felt like it had been centuries since they were last in the same room so the fact that the Doctor had Jack clasped in a passionate embrace filled him with too many feelings to count. There weren’t enough words in any known language to describe how he felt at that moment - all he could do was cry. 

The Doctor didn’t speak. The Time Lord just listened quietly as Jack let out his emotions, soaking his beloved pinstripe suit in the process, but he didn’t mind at all. To his surprise, he felt the TARDIS whirr in approval as he let his hand slide cautiously from Jack’s back to his waist. In response Jack relaxed into the hug, untensing all of his muscles and letting the Doctor continue to play with his hair as his sobs eventually fizzled out into soft sniffles.

“There there, shhh,” The Doctor murmured gently into Jack’s ear, his soothing voice caressing his mind. “It’s all going to be okay, I’m here now, everything is going to be okay,”

Jack grinned cheesily into the Doctor’s (now sopping wet) shoulder. It felt like his heart was made of cotton, fuzzy feelings bursting out of his heart and coursing through his veins with every single heartbeat.

“You okay now?”

“I’m more than okay, Doc,” Jack’s voice was shaky and quiet, almost inaudible as he mumbled his words into the Time Lord’s clothing. “You have no idea how much I needed to see you,”

A cozy warmth enveloped Jack as the Doctor hugged him even tighter. Everything felt like some sort of dream - this couldn’t be real. His heart was racing and everything just felt so… fuzzy. Maybe he _ was _dreaming, maybe he was drugged. Neither of those were true, of course, and even if he was dreaming that would never stop Jack from enjoying the little time he had with him, real or not. For the millionth time, Jack’s heart skipped a beat. The Doctor had just planted a soft kiss on Jack’s head before nuzzling back into his neck and humming in content. Neither knew how long they were going to hold onto each other for and, honestly, neither of them cared. This was all they had dreamt of for the past year or so - maybe even more. If anything, the longer they embraced the more it proved to them that dreams really do come true in the end.

Everything was going to be okay.


End file.
